Money

A couple of days ago I threw out a large container’s worth of Taco Soup, along with another, smaller, container of pulled pork and two heads of romaine lettuce. That food could have been four to six more meals, with some additions to the lettuce. We have a bowl of cold cooked pasta in the fridge too that will probably be thrown out tomorrow, in total I’d say it was a waste of about $40.

This might not seem like much, but our food budget is $400 a month, so that is one tenth of our food in the bin.

What did we do instead of eat these meals, you ask? We got take-out or fast food or we went to a restaurant, ultimately spending at least $20 each time, which is $80 – $120 spent on meals that we already had in the fridge!

After giving it lots of thought, here is my solution:

By having a handy reference page we can make a meal plan based on the food we already have, and try to get ingredients that can be used for multiple meals.

So, instead of having a bag of salad slowly wilt and turn to soup, we can have lasagne (we already have the pasta sheets) and burgers (we already have the buns) using the same 2lb, $10, serving of ground beef.

Ground beef $10 + Salad $3 + Lasagne sauce $3 = $16

Which makes it only $3.66 each, per meal!

We have some serious planning and grocery shopping to do this weekend,